Chapter 5: "Your Casanova Is Unmailable":
Mail Order Erotica and Postal Service Guardians of Public Morals

A very powerful part of the authority
structurewhich controlled eortica
was the postal inspector (with his decoy-letter aliases). Even before Comstock
lobbied the federal anti-obscenity laws through Congress in 1872, the Post
Office took as its mandate the purging of the mails from the "twin pollutants"
of fraud and obscenity.

As the administrative arm of moral entrepreneurs such
as Sumner, Catholic clergy, and New Deal postmasters, the Post Office determined
what was "unmailable" through unilateral decision of its own team of Inspectors
and Counsels; full legal adjudication was simply unavailable. Postal authorities,
therefore, meshed with other components of the social order to make up
a set of layers or "nests" of authority which unyieldingly fused sexual
explicitness with guilt and shame and humbled publishers and distributors
of erotica. Naturally, therefore, mail order dealers used a prurient sell
in their advertisements. This is a full-page spread for books of The Falstaff
Press, appearing in the magazine Film Fun in 1934:

What it suggests about Falstaff Press' books is "gross,
open, palpable," to use Shakeseare's own language about Sir John Falstaff.
In other words, it "panders" to prurience. This was the charge the postal
authorities used to close down many mail order dealers, the most significance
of which were Falstaff and the Panurge Press. Both houses published genuinely
important sexology and anthropology, but the Post Office convicted them,
on the basis of their advertising, of that species of fraud called "pandering."
That is, for commercial purposes, they aroused hidden curiosities about
sex.

The publisher's only redress was to turn to the First-Amendment
lawyer for advice on what might or might not pass the postal censor. Honorable
and liberal-minded professionals--people of the stature of Morris Ernst,
hero of the Ulysses decision and one of the period's leading free-speech
advocates-- advised publishers how to avoid what might strike the guardians
of the nation's mail as indecent or obscene. Ironically, liberal lawyers
therefore cooperated with the postal authorities in determining the kinds
and style of sexually-oriented writing to which Americans could safely
be allowed access. Such books and pamphlets did not include information
regarding birth control--except that concerned with the rhythm method.
The Catholic Church did seem to have an influence on postal policy; several
postmaster generals were Catholic, before and during the Roosevelt presidency.